Birthday Blog (a bit late)

'Tis the birthday season: Jo and I are now past, but Jess is still to come.

Celebrations are generally modest when you are 6#, but I must say that I had a very pleasant couple of days. Most of the 13th was spent in the bush with one of my PhD students. It was wet and pretty miserable, but a good preparation for what Jeannie had described as a surprise tea, and something that she hadn't tried before. After a soak in the bath all was revealed (hmm, should I rephrase that?), the meal, I mean. Paella, wow!

Paella at Casa Richardson

Huge Australian prawns and succulent Tasmanian mussels, all that saffron and the other herbs: yum! Washed down by a Marlborough (NZ) sauvignon blanc and followed by a lemon souffle sort of thing. Very nice.

And there was a little pile of presents: books, chocolates and tickets to the theatre that came via Texas (kinda).

Birthday presents.
Thanks, guys!

The tickets were for "I Am My Own Wife", a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Doug Wright, about Charlotte van Marlsdorf (born Lothar Berfelde) who lived through WWII and the communist regime in East Germany, accumulating a museum and running a secret cabaret in her basement during the communist years. The whole thing was played by one man, Robert Jarman, a very talented actor and director who is a one of Tasmania's living treasures. In two hours, he played no less that 35 characters, changing from one to another with amazing ease, and only a single costume change. The whole thing was both amusing and moving. The play was in The Backspace Theatre, which seats 50-70 people in the Theatre Royal building, so it was a very intimate performance, brilliantly enhanced by real rain on the roof at a stage in the story where Charlotte was explaining that she met another character only because of a rain storm! It made me wonder why we don't go to the theatre more often.

Robert Jarman as Charlotte van Marlsdorf.